This invention relates to an apparatus for unitizing a liquid (fuel) gauge and a strainer for use inside a fuel tank such as of an automobile.
It is established practice to provide an automobile with a fuel gauge for indicating the amount of fuel in the fuel tank and a strainer having a filter element provided at the inlet end of a suction pipe for drawing the fuel out of the fuel tank and forwarding it to the engine.
Because fuel gauges and strainers belong to different technical fields, they have heretofore been separately manufactured by different manufacturing departments of a plant or different manufactures and, thereafter, installed in the fuel tank. Thus, there have been various disadvantages such as the troublesome work involved in installing separate devices in the fuel tank, the large amount of the space they occupy within the fuel tank, the necessity of boring holes in the shell of the fuel tank for their installation, the consequent increase in the number of machining operations involved and the extra work of sealing the bored holes after installation.
These disadvantages, which have heretofore been accepted as inevitable, are the consequence of the longstanding belief that the fuel gauge and the strainer must be produced by different manufacturers.
The object of this invention is to provide a housing unit for a fuel gauge and a strainer, which unit unitizes the fuel gauge and the strainer.